The Brady Hoke era at Michigan started with an insult to Jim Harbaugh.
U-M Athletic Director Dave Brandon had two birds in the bush, but returned empty handed. And now he had to save face.
After the three-year failure of the Rich Rodriguez experiment—during which a 3-9 team was punished for practicing too much—Michigan fans were hungry for a return to greatness.
Two Michigan Men, each coached by Bo Schembechler, stood ready to restore the feeling.
Jim Harbaugh, against all odds, had built Stanford into one of America’s most rugged teams. Les Miles inherited a winner from Nick Saban at LSU, and won a national championship of his own by beating Ohio State.
They just had to be offered the job. Either would have taken it. But the offer never came.
Years later, Michigan fans would learn why: Because big-time coaches like Harbaugh and Miles would have overshadowed Dave Brandon.
In waddled Brady Hoke, with a winning percentage below .500. There was little reason to believe Hoke was ready to lead Michigan. But he knew his place on the pecking order, and to Brandon that meant everything. That meant more than winning.
Brandon was on the football team under Bo, but it wouldn’t be quite right to say he played for Bo. In the decades since he had become an “All-American in business”—his words—and seemed just the guy to bring the glory days back.
Michigan fans were excited to have him. If Brandon could make a bad pizza chain, Dominos, good, then surely he could make a great football program good again.
Michigan fans saw Brandon as a grown man who’d been a CEO and U-M regent. There was no reason to see Brandon for what he was: a man with status anxiety about his playing days. Nobody knew that Brandon was gripped by a spirit of vanity, the same one that led him to put himself in Domino’s commercials.
As author John U. Bacon wrote in “Endzone”: “Consciously or not, Brandon had to sense helping Jim Harbaugh make a triumphant return to Ann Arbor would only get Brandon a life sentence in Harbaugh’s shadow. And that was something that probably didn’t appeal to the nation’s most visible athletic director.”
After touting Hoke as a proper Michigan Man, Brandon couldn’t help himself. He took a shot at the coaches who were never offered the chance to make Michigan Football great again.
“[Hoke] didn’t spend as much time with a PR machine as others may and he may not be dressed up and polished and the toastmaster general like other people, and I don’t care,” Brandon said, insulting Harbaugh and Miles both. “I want a football coach.”
Three years later Brandon was fired, and his football coach soon joined him on the unemployment line.
It took interim athletic director Jim Hackett—he, too, a Bo guy and an All-American in business —to swallow his pride and hire Harbaugh ahead of the 2015 season.
As Bacon wrote, just about every Michigan football player alive called Harbaugh to pledge their support.
But once Harbaugh arrived, internal battles split his energy and focus.
Harbaugh’s time started with an indifferent university president, Mark Schlissel, who once whined that the Michigan Football program got more attention than a Nobel Prize at Michigan would. (This was true, actually.)
For years, Harbaugh’s personnel moves were leaked and criticized by a regent, Jordan Acker.
Acker once told a reporter that he “wanted him [Harbaugh] gone.” Had Acker got his way, there would have been no 2023 National Championship.
Harbaugh was demanding and expensive, yes. But he was also a winner who did what his mentor Schembechler never could, and made Michigan a national champion.
Michigan’s return to blueblood status was a result of Harbaugh’s force of will. How much more could Harbaugh have done, and how much longer might Harbaugh have stayed, without the knives in his back?
Acker and Dave Brandon both suffer the same affliction. Pat Riley called it the “Disease of Me”. Both AD Brandon and Regent Acker used their perch to re-do the glory days, and matter in a way they did not as students.
Acker has invited himself to speak to the Michigan Football team, perhaps relating his day job as a personal-injury lawyer to their work on the field. That’s fine. That’s to be expected.
Destabilizing the university and football program with leaks and loose talk is not. In 2026 as in 2011, a spirit of vanity threatens the rebirth of Michigan Football.
And this time there is no Jim Harbaugh out there to save the place. We had him, and we lost him.
As Michigan looks for its next coach, will it hire the best man for the job? Or will it hire another puppet who wins eight games a year?
James David Dickson is an enjoyer of Michigan Football and host of the James Dickson Podcast. Join him in conversation on X at @downi75.
